In The Beginin There Wuz Noddy

My auntie Jean had Marc Bolan’s hair. That’s right mothertruckers, the hair of Marc Bolan on my auntie Jean’s head. I was a kid – under six year’s old – and she I suppose, looking back, may have been moving toward her late twenties with three kids on the boil. It seems she decided that it was time for her to put away her childish things – so I ended up with all her 45s. Not guns – singles. Shellac slabs of dynamite as it turns out. Not only did she have Bolan’s hair – she he had all his records too.

So I sat in my room with my little red record player and looked at the red and black silhouette of an man that looked like my auntie Jean on that blue paper middle as it spun round and got clocked in the ear by to tunes like: ‘Get It On’, ‘Jeepster’, ‘Telegram Sam’, ‘Metal Guru’, ‘Children of the Revolution’ and ‘20th Century Boy’. Bold, bombastic, blistering riffs potted with psychedelic bloshy babble farted out through the rudimentary speakers. And I was teleported into a freaky netherworld. These weren’t tunes from movies or standards overheard from grown-ups. I suppose most of my magic was in my head in those days, or from films and telly, but this was before videocassettes kids! And this androgynous freak and his cast of goons sparked something in my wee – then ginger – bonce that I don’t suppose ever went away. I mean, Mr. Benn was trippy and Jamie had a Magic Torch but this shit blew my tiny mind. I suppose you have to remember that these weren’t like records to me in the traditional sense. I wasn’t yet a music fan. These were toys in the same way a rubber snake or a Stretch Armstrong was a toy. Shit, everything was a toy. My favourite thing in the world was a burnt wooden spoon at that point in my life. Things were only as shit as your imagination allowed them to be. And T Rex records were a top fucking toy.

But it wasn’t just T Rex that she gave me. There was also a bunch of Slade stuff there too - which had me bopping around like mental case. There was ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’, ‘Gudbuy T' Jane’, but most of all there was ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’. All ball-breaker of a rekkit, made when I was a bawlin’ baby blue eyed boy. I wasn’t even musically aware enough mime with a tennis racket, but I knew even then how to lose my fucking mind and I did – every time I heard that tune, I’d wig out like an epileptic dervish. And I’ve never stopped loving it. In truth it may have been one of the reasons why I could never settle stateside – who could live in a country where people thought that Quiet Riot’s version was the original? I love music that much / I’m that shallow (delete as applicable). The last time I ever got goosebumps off watching Top of the Pops was when a bearded Liam Gallagher belted it out in 1996.

The other night I was watching the Gervais/Merchant miscalculation Cemetery Junction – which should have been better than it is, but sadly instead of being a film about how boring and stifling small towns in the 70s were, it ends up being simply boring and stifling itself. Which may go some way toward explaining why I got so terribly excited when the fat lad in the hat got up and sang ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ at the local factory’s bigwigs AGM. It wasn’t a particularly good example of a that tired cinematic device where the unexpected loser rocks the socks off the squares but as he started belting it out I found myself coiling up as though I was about to pop.

As I got older, music got more and more into my blood to the point of obsession, but that tune and my reaction to it in a world before we knew that Star Wars had sequels – never mind prequels – is still the purest form of how it should be enjoyed. Through the ears and into the spirit and out through the spazz. Cum On! Feel The Noize!